The Emergency Room Test

I ended up in an emergency room recently.

I'm fine.

At the time, there was one person I never expected to hear from.

She didn't know.

At least that's what I thought.

So when there was no call, no text, no Are you okay?, I attached absolutely no meaning to it.

Why would I?

You can't expect someone to respond to something they don't know happened.

Then, weeks later, I learned she knew.

She knew I had been in the emergency room.

And she never asked one very simple question.

Are you okay?

That was all.

Not a conversation. Not an explanation. Not anything complicated.

Just three words from someone to whom I had given so much of who I was and so much of what I had.

I sat with that for a while.

Not because I was angry.

It was simply new information about someone I had loved deeply and shared an enormous part of my life with.

And once I had that information, I couldn't unknow it.

What surprised me was how one seemingly small choice could make me reconsider something so much larger.

Because if someone who had once meant that much to me could know I had been in the emergency room and choose not to ask if I was okay, I had to consider the possibility that I had misunderstood more than just that moment.

Maybe I had misunderstood some of what came before it too.

Maybe the relationship I thought I had been in was very different from the one I had actually been in.

That was the part I hadn't expected.

I had always believed that whatever else had happened between us, what we had meant to each other existed somewhere beneath all of it.

Now I wasn't so sure.

That's the strange thing about clarity. Sometimes it doesn't arrive through a conversation.

Nobody explains anything.

Nobody apologizes.

You simply learn something you didn't know before, and suddenly everything you thought you understood looks a little different.

I had spent a lot of time trying to understand her.

Trying to reconcile words with actions.

Trying to understand contradictions.

Trying to figure out what things meant.

And then I learned she knew.

Suddenly, none of that seemed important anymore.

That doesn't make her a bad person.

People are complicated. They have their own reasons for doing what they do and for not doing what they don't.

I'm sure she had hers.

I don't need to know what they were.

I learned she knew.

I learned she said nothing.

And for the first time, I didn't need to understand why.

There was simply nothing left for me to hold onto.

Paul Harkins